The Jive Aces

Raestar Jazz Promotions

Walthamstow Jazz Festival

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LondonJazz is a not-for profit venture, but may occasionally take on work as a paid publicist and/or sell advertising packages. Where a piece published after 26th October 2012 appears which is linked to this activity, the text will be followed by the following symbol: (pp)

A recent review of this double live CD from one of the UK’s most respected
guitarists praises Esmond Selwyn’s ‘clean picking, abundance of
ideas, and a tone to die for from his ES 175 with Charlie Christian
pickup’, and his website
contains fulsome tributes from (among many others) George Coleman (‘you
sound great, boy!’) and Frank Sinatra’s guitarist Tony Mottola (‘these
days my pleasure is listening to great players like yourself’), yet
Renegade’s sleeve-note writer, Digby Fairweather, is somewhat
rueful about Selwyn’s undersung status in the jazz pantheon, quoting the
late alto player Bruce Turner to illustrate his point: ‘There is no route
to greatness in British jazz’.

There is, however, a simple explanation for
this apparent neglect: he plays an instrument that – arguably more than
any other in jazz – has undergone a sea-change in the technology that
produces the sounds available to it, and as a consequence, the technique
of its practitioners, since the rise of rock music in the late 1960s.
Selwyn’s models (listed by Fairweather as Tal Farlow, George Van Eps and
Joe Pass) are simply not those commonly cited by most contemporary
guitarists, raised on the music of Carlos Santana, Lowell George, Jimi
Hendrix and post-rock-era jazz guitarists such as Bill Frisell, John
Scofield, Mike Stern et al.

Nevertheless, listening to Selwyn barrelling
his way through seven exhilarating choruses of this album’s opening track,
‘Fine and Dandy’ does induce a kind of nostalgia for the days of
clean, fleet solo runs, especially when, as here, the guitarist in
question is as well versed in what Fairweather calls ‘the sunny major-key
vocabulary of swing and its predecessors’ as in ‘the advanced harmonic
lines and devices that distinguished bebop’.

Throughout a nicely balanced
set that includes accommodating standards (‘All the Things You Are’,
‘Just One of Those Things’ etc.) as well as jazz classics and bop
staples (‘Blue Monk’, ‘All Blues’, ‘Yardbird Suite’),
Selwyn breezes confidently through a series of joyous, exuberant but
consistently musicianly solos, competently shadowed by pianist Paul
Sawtell, bassist Bill Coleman and drummer Tony Richards,
to the audible satisfaction of an enthusiastic audience.

Those wishing to
hear Selwyn in an organ-trio setting, moreover, might like to investigate
another Slam CD, The Middle Half, on which Selwyn plays alongside
organist John-Paul Gard and drummer Robin Jones. Great
playing like this should never really go out of fashion.